Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Opposite Person

For the past two years I’ve lived in rural Honduras. I have an internet connection. I read the U.S news—too much of it, perhaps. I watch my teams, the Bulls and the Saints. I’m not off the grid, not like my uncle was when he did Peace Corps in Ethiopia in the 60’s. I’ve come back for the holidays, seen family, and besides the odd sensation that I’m driving by rows and rows of hotels, I’ve been saved from culture shock. But there have been these feelings.
The other day a Babe Ruth picture nearly brought me to tears. A far cry from the Yankee Bambino that drank beer between innings and waddled out of the dugout only to hit 410-foot home runs, this picture shows a different Babe. He sits in the stands, a quiet, concerned spectator wearing a three-piece suit. One leg rests over the other and his hands are folded in quiet respect on one knee. The seats directly around Babe are empty. Several rows behind him, a man reads a newspaper. In the next seat is a woman wearing a big, floppy, black hat. She’s laughing at something the man next to her has said. Nearby, a man with a scorecard and a beatific smile puffs on a cigar. It is easy to feel the weather in pictures like this—indeed, to feel the actual day. But it is gone and Babe is squinting over his shoulder. He is perhaps three years past his prime, not invisible, but clearly not bigger than the game. The game—perhaps he is realizing— will go on without him.
Another unexpected feeling grabbed me during an NBA postgame show. There was a white host and a black host. The white guy was a lifetime suburbanite, a college graduate with a degree in communications. The black guy was a retired professional ball player, one who grew up in a rough neighborhood in Chicago; one who made it, who perhaps saw friends and family killed, beaten by police. The topic during the postgame show, however, was basketball. The white guy asked the questions, the black guy answered them. One deferred to the other. They even joked around some. It was soothing. It seemed a nod to history, harmony. Black and white: America’s two hosts.
Then it happened again. I was watching Michael Jordan’s first NBA game online, a winning effort against the Washington Bullets. The video quality was poor, and the commercials had not been edited out. Surprisingly, the commercials were the most interesting part. Alka Seltzer. No matter what shape your stomach is in, when it gets out of shape, take Alka Seltzer. Better than any other antacid. Better than anything you can get without a prescription. Anything. Alka Seltzer. It’s the best. There was something refreshing about the language. It was bold, direct. There was another commercial, this one appearing to have been financed by the Arizona Department of Tourism. When hay fever pollen invades your sinuses, brings runny nose and watery eyes, take Dristan. Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona. Yes. Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona. When pollen causes hay fever misery, don’t wish you could be in sunny, dry Arizona. Just remember: Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona.
It was unequivocal, unashamed solicitation, not yet the post-commercial world where people try and make themselves appear to be everything—anything—but what they are. It was so...American.
Then a familiar face: Ronald McDonald. He wore a cheap, red wig and ran around hugging kids. It was simple, low-budget. Just a man in a suit, selling burgers. You could see the wrinkles under the face paint. He seemed genuinely happy, which was a relief. What scares people about clowns is their humanness, not the makeup— the emotions being concealed, the falsity. These days Ronald is largely absent. If anything he's a cartoon, or sometimes a life-sized, cardboard cutout waving goodbye by the door. Because McDonald's isn't trying to sell me hamburgers anymore; they're trying to sell me a lifestyle in which I would eat hamburgers. The commercials are measured, calculatedly slick and relatable, but always a little off, something like Arnold Friend in “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Babe, Alka-Seltzer, Ronald. What it boiled down to was an unexpected sort of patriotism. Unexpected because I've always disliked authority, always sided with the underdogs, and patriotism has always seemed a far too obvious choice. Plus, in the United States, it seems irrevocably tied to an anti-intellectual, conservative worldview, which is not in line with my upbringing. In the 8th grade I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because I didn’t, and don’t, believe in God. Mr. Thompson, a bald and humorless math instructor who— for other reasons, I think—hated me, insisted that I read it. I confidently refused and I was happy, actually excited, when he sent me to the office. Surely they would side with me—with the Constitution—and force Mr. Thompson to abide my little rebellion. They did, and only now that I’m a teacher do I understand how truly vexing I must have been for poor Mr. Thompson. Only now that I’ve lived outside the country, where getting a quality education is a privilege and not a right, do I realize that it’s the America that would have told me to “shut up and read the damn Pledge” that I’m beginning to miss.
With all I've said in my life about being a liberal, what have I actually done? Sure I've complained, but I’ve never even voted. I was out of the country for the last presidential election, and out of my home state for the one before that, but surely if I cared I could have cast a ballot absentee. I don't appear to be any more prejudiced than your average person, but I sometimes I wonder: what if I’m much, much more? Perhaps I'm an Opposite Person.
Opposite People have fears that are so overwhelming that they're forced to display the opposite. There are countless models: the ladies man that's afraid of intimacy, the libertarian that's actually uncomfortable with people being free, the hippie: a person who cares so crushingly about what people think of their appearance that they forgo it altogether, and replace it with a sort of form. The greatest of all Opposite People, I think, are patriots: a group of individuals that are almost uniformly dissatisfied with their own countries. They say things like, “I’m damn proud to be an American,” yet don't acknowledge the authority of the federal government. They benefit inordinately from government relief, but often, on ideological grounds, refuse to pay taxes. A small, but outspoken minority of patriots (American and otherwise) consider the current, democratically-elected president a communist. More treasonous statements are uttered by self-defined patriots, I would guess, than any other one group. Why does this happen? Is it the love of something that’s no longer there, something that was never really more than an idea, that turns people screwy? Do we attack outward expressions of what we fear we really are? Perhaps it’s something about balance, the equalizing of some pressure that ensures we never do exactly what it is we want to do.

Maybe it’s wise to embrace the things you’ve spent your life opposing. Temperance prevents us from becoming monsters, but maybe it also prevents us from realizing the small truths that exist on our dark sides. Some people take drugs to experience their opposite sides. I did my fair share of that, but I had to stop. For me, drugs turned out to be just like the commercials. So now, I entertain the possibility that they’re right, all my opposites, and since then, the world has seemed much more sane. Because what if trickle-down economics is actually the best way? Why don’t I pull myself up by my bootstraps? What if we are liberaling ourselves into the ground? Here I am traveling, but why? What else could I be, in the end, but an American?