Many years ago: My pal Tommy and I were in a bar in Provo, Utah, playing pool against a couple of locals. We were losing, and the 3.2 beer wasn’t working.
He was second-guessing my shot selection and I reminded him that I’d quit smoking not long before and warned him that my fuse was not as long as it used to be.
He asked me if I was going to punch him in the face.
Through gritted teeth, I suggested we change the subject.
“To what?”
“How bout … Corvettes?”
***
Boy, there have been some hard facts of human truth that Americans have had to swallow whole lately. Or are these American truths that humans have had to swallow whole?
Young people are easily radicalized because they don’t have the Rube Goldberg intellect an adult must develop in order to face how complicated everything really is in this world. (So they do dumb things that they think will help, like murdering cultural figures they think are evil, and excitedly going off to dubious wars, for their country.)
Older people are really mostly concerned with their livelihoods, and generally in the face of civic danger, their civic convictions collapse in sections. (Unfortunately, the more established and potentially influential these people are, the less they will be willing to risk losing their ability to pay their big mortgages and put their kids through fancy colleges.)
Americans who haven’t done as well as their parents or whose children aren’t doing better than they did feel so white-hotly ashamed of this that their shame turns to insensate rage at pretty much any group of people who pretty much any public figure publicly blames for their plight.
Americans who have done a little better than their parents behave as if their parents were shoeless sharecroppers and they themselves are Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick. (And how much patience can these desperate strivers afford to have with “civics,” “civility” and bullshit concepts like that?)
And almost nobody is interested in listening to almost anybody—even, really, the people on their own side—even, honestly, to themselves. This feels like the lowest point of a marriage, where every argument is about everything, but each has given up on convincing the other of anything and each is terrified if they say anything at all, they’ll explode.
***
“I hate Corvettes,” Tommy said. And we both burst out laughing.
Leave a Reply