for
8/19/2000
This is an essay that I've been working on for a while, but that hasn't really managed to come out. It's about modern culture, in a way, and America, and the things that make us who we are, combined with the parts of our personalities that rub against each-others'. It's about a lot of things, sort of. Counter-intuitively, it's not the scope of the topic that makes it hard to capture, but its smallness. I'm writing about the caulking in the joints and the water in a granite breakwater.
I'd promised myself that I'd save this note for later, but it was finishing Sebastian Junger's book The Perfect Storm that helped me finally sit down and wrestle this one out. The afterward of the book describes, in Junger's characteristic clipped straightforwardness, how he managed to get the story. How he talked to all of these fishermen, and the people in their lives. People who, at least by a degree of separation, know life and death as townsfolk.
I'm reminded also of Tom Brokaw's book. (It's a hazard of working in a bookstore; you start to think in books.) Men my age got ripped out of their lives, fought and died bravely, and so we call them the "greatest generation." And as well we should, in my opinion.
Here's why. We live in a modern America with way too much time on its hands. It's a place of plastic, but not plastic like we know. This is the kind of plastic that insulates our lives. The stuff that keeps us propped up away from where the rubber meets the road, and deadens the sound away.
Wouldn't it be great if everyone in the world would just be nice to each other? What's the best diet for my cardiovascular health? What did he really mean by that? No one will care if I steal this. My life is too stressful. I don't want to ever have a family. God is watching over me. Communism works.
Here's the short and the long of what I'm trying to say. Stop trying to make your life easy. Your life already is easy. You have no major plagues upon your house, food is refrigeratable, movable and plentiful, hospitals are always nearby and police officers protect you while you sleep. The electric and telecommunications grids are reliable. If you want to get across the country, you can do so in an afternoon. Don't feel like flying? You have at your disposal the second man-made object that can be seen from space, the U.S. highway system. The greatest public works project in the history of the world not good enough for you? Go fucking Amtrak.
But we lose sight of all this. We do. We, as Americans, are cursed with seeing our beautiful knot of sub-cultures and different-colored rocks as the entirety of the planet, and of history. We forget that we're living in the Garden, and that people are sealing themselves into cargo containers to get in here and eat the rest of the apple that we discarded. We have it good.
And that's okay. That's just great. Top of the world, ma; time to step off to the stars--which, by the way, is just what I'd like to see. But the plastic keeps the culture in an odd state. Instead of pooling around a new goal at a time of strength, we freeze onto tiny problems.
Youth crime drops to its lowest level since the 1920s; meanwhile, a few kids shoot up their schools, and it's an epidemic of youth violence. People use actual terrorist tactics to disrupt the World Trade Organization because 10% of the country's population owns 90% of it's wealth, neglecting the fact that people aren't exactly eating horses in the street, and that in a non-land-based economy, such a thing doesn't make the other 90% of us any poorer. A popular President serves eight years and is remembered for getting a blow-job from an ugly intern. (Yes, we do care that she was ugly, and no, in Europe this wouldn't have even made the papers.)
It's plastic that keeps parents alienated from their children. It's plastic that makes people worry about the subtleties of their relationships instead of building themselves into mate material. It's plastic that keeps people so afraid of racism that they can't forget that the silly concept ever existed. In short, it's plastic that freezes into those little cracks in America and makes them bigger. This is plastic. This is your enemy.
And, in an ironic way, it's that plastic that helped a freelance tree-climber/journalist become the author of the most successful non-fiction book since, well... since The Greatest Generation. It didn't help him write it, though. He wrote the book by getting right in there, face-to-face with the human tragedies, and not flinching--not sliding the book into a traditional story of some kind. For that, of course, he gets all 21 guns from the Space Toast Page. No, it was the plastic that made people buy it. Let me explain.
To lay this all out flat, we have a jumpy, information-crammed book here. It doesn't have a happy ending. The events take place ten years ago, and have largely been forgotten. It's about, of all things, fishing, and avoids Tuesdays with Morrie-style sentimentality at all costs. Why its popularity? Realism. That taste of events we're never likely to have to go through, where life and death are at either of our shoulders. That humming sound where the rubber meets the road.
So what am I saying? Am I saying go out there and risk your lives needlessly? No. I never would. I'm saying don't forget. Don't forget how good you have it. We're the spoiled little rich kids of history, and it's time we started learning how hard it really is to run daddy's business.
S. J.
Touch the Toast