So we had a bit of downtime at the hospital last night, and I was hanging out with two co-workers at the nurses’ station. While they talked about their exercise regimen, I casually picked up two one-ounce measurement cups and performed a bit of idle physical comedy (the specifics are not relevant) that cracked both of them up.
“Oh God, oh God,” said Hope, “oh, don’t make me laugh, my stomach is still too sore!”
Now, I knew that I had just ripped off a joke from 1941, a Steven Spielberg comedy put out in 1979. However, I also knew that neither of my co-workers would recognize the joke because (i) 1941 is not a particularly well-regarded movie and therefore is not particular well-known, and (ii) both women are about 20 years younger than I am – there isn’t much of a chance they’ve even heard of this movie, let alone have seen it.
I was thinking about that this evening during a quick run to buy groceries. And that, in turn, got me thinking about how it does seem to me that people my age still routinely make reference to pop culture touchstones – movies, especially (“Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya.”) – but that I don’t see too much of that kind of referencing with younger people. (Of course, I could be wrong about all that, but let’s assume for the sake of this story that my perception is correct.) I then started speculating about what might lie behind this generational difference.
Of course, my immediate thought was that this is just further evidence that the pop culture stuff I grew up with was simply better than the stuff being put out today. Today’s movies, I thought to myself, are just a bunch of sequels, knock-offs, and remakes, tired retreads that Hollywood formulaically spits out to ensure a necessary return on investment. Not like the kind of new, auteur stuff that captivated my generation.
But that is all my grandfather’s bollocks. Good Lord, I started thinking about this stuff because the other night I ripped off a joke from 1941! (Again . . . while the movie has always cracked me up, no discerning cinephile thinks of 1941 as a cutting-edge or even, really, an especially good movie.)
No, after a little additional reflection, I imagine that what better accounts for a perceived lack of universal pop culture touchstones in modern society is the simple fact that there is just a ton more entertainment choices available today. While there may still be a couple of universally popular entertainments – certainly, Star Wars springs to mind – it is also the case that pretty much every interest, no matter how niche-like, is now catered to. Whatever one happens to be interested in, whatever the genre or medium (video games are huge; comic book sales are stagnant, but comic book characters are bigger than ever; and do I even have to mention “bronies”?) not only can you find it somewhere, but through the magic of social media you can instantly hook up with a like-minded community sharing exactly the same interest.
When we are all free to pursue what interests us the most, we don’t have to spend a lot of time pursuing what interests most of us.
Which, of course, is great for promoting and indulging our personal interests and tastes, our idiosyncratic styles and passions, but (as many people before me have pointed out) it has the potential to lead to a more fractured culture and possibly even a more fractious society. Twenty years ago, you could go to work on a Friday and suddenly spout “No soup for you!” and all your co-workers would immediately recognize the reference to the Seinfield episode that aired just the night before. But as we become more and more spoiled with entertainment options, this kind of instant pop culture bonding increasingly seems less likely.
None of which presents any kind of actual problem – not really – but, unfortunately, there is every reason to believe terrible people for despicable purposes can turn it into a problem. Indeed, there is some evidence that this is happening now.
About two weeks ago, The Washington Post published an article entitled "Trump's Effect on Muslim Debate Reverberates in Heartland." It is a report that I cannot recommend enough for its poignancy, and for the all too recognizably tragic and human sadness that it captures (please, do click through and read the entire thing).
It turns out that in Grand Forks, North Dakota there is a community of Somali refugees who have settled and grown there for over a decade. Many still wear tunics and hijabs and, like immigrants the world over, they still speak their native language and struggle to learn the language of their new home. Until recently, they had lived without incident next to their neighbors, all the while working to adapt themselves to the United States of America and to avail themselves of the most basic of a civilized society’s promises: the freedom to build a business, to find work, to have a family home of one’s own. Like everybody else in this country, they send their children to school and they hope and dream their children have the opportunity to pursue a higher education.
But only hours after Donald Trump called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, someone turned a 40-ounce Bud Light bottle into a Molotov cocktail and tossed it through the window of Juba Coffee and Restaurant, one of only two Somali-owned businesses in the city, a meeting place of sorts for the immigrant community.
(The other Somali-owned business in Grand Forks is Safari Market, which sells oils, basmati rice, halal meat, and Somali fruit juice. From the Washington Post article: “Before the first customer could walk through the door, someone wrote ‘Somali Niggers’ on the property, according to local news reports. Amare said they opened anyway because they refused to be scared.”)
But what leaped out at me when I read this article, what I found so utterly, utterly depressing, wasn’t the bigotry and bile and hatred that it recounted; what leaped out at me was an absence. There was a complete and total absence of any reason – any reason – for anybody in Grand Forks to have reacted the way some of them did to the presence of these Somali immigrants. The hate, the fear, the paranoia, and the lashing out that is recounted seems to have occurred for no reason other than that these people are different.
I thought the following statement, from Terry Bjerke, a Grand Forks City Council member who is now running to be the Grand Forks mayor, illustrated this perfectly:
Bjerke said that he was upset that there were no statistics to show whether refugees had been responsible for an increase in robberies or burglaries. With so many refugee students learning English in school, he wondered whether native speakers were losing valuable time from their teachers. Most upsetting, he said, was that the Somalis were not adopting “American customs,” such as playing hockey or eating hot dogs.
Although he condemned attacks on Muslims, Bjerke said they might have been “the cost of doing business” in a country that rightly values free speech.
(emphasis added).
Now, there is a lot to jeer at in these maunderings. There is the obvious point that being the victim of a fire bombing in no way is “the cost of doing business” in a country that adheres to Free Speech principles, and any suggestion to the contrary is a disgusting perversion of our First Amendment protections.
More subtle but more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that the first two things that Bjerke says upsets him about Grand Forks’s immigrant population are terrors that he appears to have simply imagined for himself (or, much more likely, for the people he hopes to persuade to vote for him). Has there been an increase in crime because of immigrants? Well, there isn’t any evidence of this, but Bjerke says he is really, really upset that nobody is looking for any. Are English-speaking children being short-changed because teachers are having to teach English to Somali children? Again, Bjerke doesn’t have any evidence for this, but he is really, really upset that nobody is looking for any such evidence.
(But, hey! Bjerke isn’t anti-immigrant, is he? I mean, he’s just asking questions. Much the same way Fox News does.)
But, by far, the most revealing comment made here is Bjerke’s identification of the thing about these immigrants that he finds “most upsetting”: the fact they don’t play ice hockey or eat hot dogs. They are not exactly like me! -- goes the eternal, immortal complaint – how can I ever trust them? Better to be safe than sorry!
And suddenly – and completely defensively (it will be claimed, after the fact) – come the Molotov cocktails, and the guns, and (as the article points out actually was the case in Grand Forks, North Dakota) the swastikas.
* * *
I have come to think that the fundamental political argument in this country is between two different stories, two competing narratives that each strive to explain America to its successive generations.
On the one hand, you have the story in which I, personally, believe. I believe that the United States of America is sui generis in the history of nation states. I believe that it was called forth not from the wilderness, not from Providence, not by the hand of God, but from the mind of Man. I believe that the United States of America was the first country to be founded by a group of people who truly were children of the Age of Enlightenment; individuals who believed in the power of reason, individuals who truly believed that people are capable of governing themselves, and who trusted the people to be able to do this.
To my way of thinking, if you want to be an American, you have only to believe in three things:
- You believe in the rule of law, and reject any effort to pervert that rule by means of force;
- You believe in representative democracy, and that policy differences are to be adjudicated at the ballot box, by a vote of the majority;
- You believe that – notwithstanding (2) above – there are certain freedoms that are so essential to the actual people who make up the body politic that they may not be abridged by majority rule (y’know, things like the freedom to worship, or not, as you please; the freedom to say and think what you like; the freedom to associate with whom you like; the freedom to be let alone unless necessary , i.e., 4th & 5th Amendment protections, etc., etc., etc., what we call today the Bill of Rights.)
So far as this story of America is concerned, anybody that wants to agree to these few rules is more than welcome to join the club.
C’mon in, buddy, I wanna say, come on in and join our party! We’re gonna have a fun time, we’re gonna make this a great joint, and we want everybody to have as much fun as we’re gonna have! Because our way is better, and we just wanna make the party bigger! And we don’t care about your color, or your language, or your religion, or where you’re from, or what you eat! Hey, you got something cool to share? Hey, buddy, bring it over here and let me try it out! I’ll show you my neat idea if you show me yours.
Let’s you and me talk, and let’s you and me commune, and let’s you and me come up with something new and wonderful. Together.
On the other hand . . .
There is another, competing story of America that gets told. It’s not as compelling a story, maybe, but it has the advantage of being old and incredibly familiar and thus, when things get a little scary, it’s an easy story to fall back on, out of sheer habit if nothing else.
It’s the story that says that we’re all better off sticking with the familiar and with the known. It’s the story that says that you can’t trust anything new or different. It’s the story that tells us there is such a thing as “purity,” and that this is a thing to reach for because if we’re all pure enough then we’re all safe, too.
It’s the story that tells you that the United States of America is not an idea, but a people – almost certainly (according to the story) a white, Christian, straight people, the people who (historically speaking) always have been America’s majority culture. It’s the story that says that anything too far from this cultural description is by definition un-American. It’s the story that plays on human prejudices and cultural touchstones and that whispers in the ear that these things ultimately are more important than the mere idea upon which our country might have been founded.
It is a story that calls to blood rather than reason, and to the familiar rather than the interesting, and to being safe rather than true.
* * *
But I am beginning to think (even, in my heart of hearts, to hope) that this other story is beginning to die out. Not, unfortunately, because a lot of people have begun to reject the story as dumb and cowardly, but just because this story no longer makes a lot of sense. It makes very little sense to continue to insist that there is a “right” way to be, when anybody with internet access can see for themselves that there is an entire spectrum of ways to be, and that no particular cultural way is the “right” way.
There’s a whole, wide, wild world out there and in our heart of hearts we all know that we’re all a little bit off, but we can look around and see that none of us are really alone either.
My real hope, though, my greatest wish is that the first story I described, what I think of as the real American story, spreads. Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . we’re all different, and we’re all weird, and we all have our peculiarities, but if we’re gonna make it, we’re gonna have to make it together.
I’d love to see a uniting “culture” that wasn’t one – just a coupla good ideas, endlessly wrangled over, about how to make the system work best for us all. Accompanied by the recognition that any “traditional” cultural concern - who we worship or whether we worship, what sports we play, what language we speak, what food we eat, what clothes we wear, what we believe, who we love, what we look like – is interesting, but ultimately superfluous.
Like icing on a cake.